Professor Niels Kjærgaard

We are presently developing a novel collider to perform high precision atomic physics measurements. This research is supported for three years by the Marsden Fund, selected in the 2011 round as one of 5 projects funded across Physics, Chemistry, and Biochemistry in New Zealand. As the high-energy colliders used in particle physics like the LHC at CERN, our apparatus will smash together bunches of atoms and analyze the spatial distribution of the scattered debris. However, our collider will operate in a regime of extreme contrast: it will use samples of atoms at nano-Kelvin temperatures accelerated to pedestrian velocities of up to a meter per second. The full execution of this collider utilizes a collaboration with theorists who have developed state-of-the-art calculations to extract key information from the experimental scattering patterns.

Find out more about my research.

Current teaching

PHSI 191 Biological Physics
PHSI 132 Fundamentals of Modern Physics
PHSI 282 Experimental Physics I
PHSI 331 Quantum, Atomic and Particle Physics